Apologies if this post ain’t right for this community! I’m admittedly not interested in self-hosting myself, but I’ve a close buddy who’s wanting to get back to streaming, but rightfully hates Amazon. He’s wanting to self-host with Owncast to do video streaming with his pals, but lives in a very small flat with very little free space - hence the request for a laptop.
Ideally he’s needing something great for video encoding, and Linux friendly to boot. No Windows. Mate’s got a budget of ~£1,000.
If there’s a better community for this lemme know!
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Is he planning to also use the laptop as a laptop?
If not, there are small form factor PCs (especially if you’re willing to buy used business stuff) that don’t take up a lot of space that can be good options. Laptops have some features that are kind of nice on a server as well (the battery becomes a backup against power outages and you don’t need to remote access or plug stuff in to use it because it has a built in display and keyboard), but I don’t think they’re so nice that it’s usually worth buying a laptop just for that purpose. It’s more a reason that repurposing an old one makes sense. If you’re willing to pay the premium a new laptop adds, you can get some pretty low profile units.
with a $1000 budget they might want to consider building a computer as desktops usually provide better performance/per cost rather than buying a $1000 laptop
- desktop pcs can also be small if a small form-factor like ITX or mini-ITX is chosen (although mini-ITX can be pricey)
building is incredibly easy as there’s a plethora of tutorial vids online and you’re less likely to get screwed over by an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or retailer
- diy vs. buying a pre-built
the fediverse here also has an active community for support !buildapc@lemmy.world
The one caveat to building is if you build a PC and a single component is faulty, you are now responsible for determining which component is to get the RMA done. That can be a big hassle. One time for me it was actually two different components that needed to be replaced by the manufacturers, and that was a pain to figure out.
that is definitely true however the added benefit is typically a longer warranty range as buying a laptop would typically mean that all components would be sold under a single flat warranty cycle/deadline
plus even if your computer is borked, you can still take it into a microcenter, memoryexpress, brick-and-mortor retailer to have their technicians figure it out the problem for a cost
I often have these time vs cost tradeoff discussions with my customers after they’ve been informed on the basics
